Fall Tour 2000

Back to Day 1

Day 2: Cannon Valley Trail

In the morning, Jean and I woke up in the Sea Wing room at the St. James Hotel. I was a little stiff from having ridden 70 miles with a head- and crosswind over rolling terrain the day before. Jean, on the other hand, was raring to get her bike out and go riding. We decided to ride the Cannon Valley Trail from Red Wing to Cannon Falls and back. This is about a 40 mile round trip on a slight grade rising from Red Wing to Cannon Falls. After that we would drive together to the historic Anderson House Hotel in Wabasha MN.

The first order of the day, as far as I was concerned, was breakfast. The St. James Hotel complex contains a couple of restaurants. We had eaten dinner in the Port of Red Wing last night and today decided to have lunch at the Veranda, a smaller and much less formal restaurant. Breakfast was biased towards carbohydrates, with pancakes featuring highly. The pancakes were made from a local company's products- Sturdiwheat- and were light and delicious.

Restoked, the next thing was to get a new rear tire and tube. I was not confident about the tire after having it sliced open by road debris on the ride down to Red Wing, and had temporarily booted it with a dollar bill. This got me to Red Wing without problems, but I was concerned that the inner tube would get chafed and puncture again. There is one bike shop in Red Wing, The Outdoor Store. The staff proved to be quite friendly and helpful, but unfortunately did not have a suitable tire or an appropriately sized inner tube. They booted the tire for me with a double layer of inner tube, and I hoped it would be good enough. The Outdoor Store also had a collection of vintage bikes in various stages of restoration and reassembly. An old late-70's Cinelli (in Jean's size) caught my wife's eye. It wasn't for sale (whew!) but the owner hinted that "it could be, I suppose..."

Jean and I rode our Heron and Rivendell, respectively, up Main Street of Red Wing. Red Wing is a quintessential river town, with most of the business district spread along the levee for a couple of miles and the residential areas placed inland, up the gentle ridge away from the river. Red Wing is at the north end of Minnesota's famous "Hiawatha Valley," the bluff country through which the Mississippi River flows. The bluffs are mostly limestone and sandstone, rising 300-600 feet above the river and typically 1-2 miles apart. The river, originally a miasma of channels and backwaters, has an artificially maintained main channel which is dredged out and maintained by a series of stone "wing dams" and large locks and dams to ensure the viability of barge traffic up and down the river between Minneapolis and New Orleans.

Red Wing is also a railroad town, with one active line still running through it. Another line, long defunct, is now the Cannon Valley Trail. There are a number of rails-to-trails conversions in southeastern Minnesota, the most famous being the Root River Trail which economically revitalized- it would not be too great a stretch to say "saved"- a number of sleepy towns. Minnesota now has over 1000 miles of paved, rural recreational bicycle trails.

The eastern trail head for the Cannon Valley Trail is just north of the old Red Wing Pottery factory. The CVT is a paved trail, built and maintained with private funds. It costs $2 per day to use, with an honor system payment box at either end of the trail and another in the middle, at Welch. I was backtracking since I'd ridden on the trail from Welch to Red Wing the night before. Jean was frisky and rolled out of Red Wing at a good pace. She had decided that she wanted to average 15 mph for the 40+ miles, which is a pretty good clip for her. The photo was taken on the spur of the moment as I rode behind Jean, heading west out of Red Wing towards Cannon Falls.

The weather was again beautiful, with clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid-50's. There was a mild breeze out of the southwest again, but in the shelter of the valley of the Cannon River we rarely even felt it. At the Red Wing end of the trail, the river is right next to you. At times, the river seemed to have run dry, although perhaps we were looking at side channels rather than the main channel. The weather was uncharacteristically dry in southeastern Minnesota for much of the summer, and rivers and lakes were quite low. The trail gradually rises, rarely more than a few percent of grade, yet soon you are about 50 feet above the Cannon River. Less than halfway between Red Wing and Cannon Falls lies Welch, with a ski resort and a small village nestled in a beautiful valley between craggy limestone bluffs. It is very common to see hawks and turkey vultures, even eagles, soaring. Because of the rivers (the Mississippi is only a few miles away to the east), there are many varieties of birds to be seen in this area. This is especially true during the migratory seasons, during which Canada geese, swans, canvasback and other varieties of ducks, etc stop over on their flight to their winter grounds.

We got into Cannon Falls in good time. On the main street, I noticed a bike shop and decided to stop to see if they had a spare inner tube in the size I needed. This shop, as it turned out, was run by two women which is the first bike shop I've ever seen where this is the case. They had the tube I needed and also had a Brooks Colt saddle for sale for $50. This would have been a good price normally, but as the future of Brooks was in the air and it looked like they would be out of business soon, the price of Brooks saddles had nearly tripled. I bought it, even though I didn't have a specific need for yet another Brooks saddle... but it is nice to have spares.

Leaving the bike shop, we stopped at the local IGA to buy lunch. In the parking lot, as I was getting back on my bike to follow Jean over to a nearby park, an older man stopped me to talk. He asked me a few questions about my bike and I told him we had come up the Cannon Valley Trail. He beamed and said he had been a railroad man, working on that very line for many years. He was happy to reminisce briefly about it, and then bid us a good ride and went on his way. One of the advantages of bike touring is that you are accessible to people, much more so than if you are in a car. Because of that, you meet people and learn things you would never find out otherwise.

Jean and I ate lunch on a bank overlooking the Cannon River as it flowed through Cannon Falls. We were only a hundred yards or so from the falls themselves, which were pretty anemic due to the low water level. The sun was nice and warm even though the air was cool, which gave us the odd sensation of being hot on our sunny sides and chilly on the other side. We got back on the trail and rode back to Red Wing, a bit faster than my complaining legs would have liked as Jean was still riding to make that 15 mph average. Ouch! It was a little surprising to have a basically flat ride be uncomfortable at a 15 mph average, after having ridden in dozens of races and ridden over 5,000 training miles before the start of the tour. I hadn't expected that the first day would take so much out of me.

We got back to Red Wing with plenty of time in the afternoon to explore. It is a short drive from Red Wing to Wabasha, and we loaded both bikes in to the Volkswagen bus. South of Red Wing is Lake City, the birthplace of water skiing according to signs on both ends of town. In the middle of town is a large marina with lots of sailboats. Sailing is quite popular on Lake Pepin. South of town we stopped at the Pepin Heights Orchards to buy apples. One of my favorite things about fall is apples, and in Minnesota an amazing variety of apples are available from local orchards. We bought a half peck each of Honeycrisps and Regent apples. Yummy!

On the outskirts of Wabasha is a place called L.A.R.K. Toys. This was started nearly 20 years ago by a man named Donn Kreofsky, who coincidentally had been my freshman year photography teacher at St. Mary's College in Winona MN. Donn started the business as a way to sell wooden toys he had made, and it grew from there. Donn is a toy collector and has a huge collection of toys in cases throughout the building. The crowning thing at L.A.R.K. is the carousel. Perhaps that should be Carousel. Donn and a team of master woodcarvers have built an amazing carousel, the "horses" of which are a mind-boggling collection of fanciful creatures. Photos do not do the carvings justice- they have to be seen and studied to fully appreciate them.

L.A.R.K. also features a mini-golf course that is quite fun and challenging. It seems to be a work in progress, with some very well through out features. It was here that I discovered that Jean has a competitive streak I didn't know about. She did her best to out-golf me, but after 18 holes we both had a score of 60 strokes. I have no idea what par is for this course, but I suspect we were both well over.

After exploring L.A.R.K. for a couple of hours, we were off to Wabasha proper. Wabasha was the "home" of the movie "Grumpy Old Men" and its sequel. Only the opening sequence was actually filmed in Wabasha, with the rest of the movie being filmed in various places in Minnesota. The script was written by a native of Red Wing and many of the characters are based on actual people from Wabasha. No one will actually own up to it, however! Slippery's is a real place, however, and we had dinner there. The food was quite good and the bar and restaurant looked nothing like the one on the movie.

We stayed at The Anderson House, the oldest continually-operated hotel in Minnesota which is still owned by the same family. The photo is swiped from their Website. What can we say about our stay at the Anderson House? Well, it was historic, if "historic" means "run down and poorly maintained." Our room was tiny, with barely enough room to walk around the bed, and the bathroom seemed to have been a closet that had plumbing installed. There was no ventilation and the bathroom window was caulked shut. The flooring, not surprisingly, showed signs of significant water infiltration and rot. The room door was warped and didn't shut entirely, meaning that every noise in the hallway was broadcast right into our room. Since we were at the top of the stairs, there was lots of noisy foot traffic from people coming up to their rooms and going to the floor above us. Upstairs was a convention of employees of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the shared bathroom on that floor which seemed to be right above our room. Sleep was a precious commodity that night, which wasn't helped by the staff vacuuming the stairway at 7:00 AM the next morning.

To be fair, as we were leaving we peeked into a few open rooms on our floor and noted that most of them looked much nicer than ours, which was one of the cheapest rooms. The final annoyance was that the room was charged at the higher "peak season" rate ($80); it would have been overpriced at the regular rate($55). The Anderson House has been in business well over 100 years, however, so not everyone's experience can have been as bad as ours. In fact, the Anderson House is really quite well known and is a tourist destination in its own right. The staff told us that the owners are planning to do quite a bit of restoration work in the next year, which our room certainly needed badly. Our advice about the Anderson House? Just don't take Room 17 if you stay there!

On to Day 3